


what happens when everything is broken?

by bluestxrsbats



Series: white streak ficlets [1]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Bruce Wayne is Batman, I can only write angst for our boy jay, Jason Todd Angst, Jason Todd Feels, Jason Todd Has Issues, Jason Todd is Red Hood, Jason Todd is Robin, Jason-Centric, Resurrected Jason Todd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2020-06-29 18:45:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19836310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluestxrsbats/pseuds/bluestxrsbats
Summary: The Red Hood is angry. Jason Todd is broken. Both alter ego and teenager is tired. So tired.Somedays, he wished that he was never resurrected. Sleep would have been easier, that was for sure.





	what happens when everything is broken?

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave comments and kudos, it makes my day to know that people enjoy these fics! Thank you :)

He grabbed the man - who knows what he was called, it didn’t matter, because he had sold drugs to kids and killed a girl barely twelve - by his sweaty shirt and threw him against the wall. The man trembled like a little child, hands clumsily clasping a gun like it would make a difference. It wouldn’t.

The Red Hood knocked it out of his clammy grip with ease, its echo clattering loudly. At this, the man cried wet and ugly tears, begging for his life as if he finally knew that it was the end of the line for him. Jason didn’t care.

“Who do you work for?” The only sound was two cats scrabbling away at a dustbin mere metres away, the silence of the alley where bodies lay unconscious, dead.

“I won’t ask again.” His voice was scrambled and robotic under the hood, the eyes glowing like beacons in the dark, beacons that were known to belong to the bringer of true justice in Gotham. He wasn’t like the Bat; The Red Hood - Jason - took blood, struck fear into the hearts of men because he would make them hurt in ways that they never had before. He stepped on the man’s sweaty hands, unaffected by the man’s cry of pain, bubbling sobs.

Curled below Jason like an unfurling mouse, he sobbed as Jason twisted his heel on the man’s wrist. “Talk.” He was going to tell him everything, they always did in the end. Jason was tired of having to say the same things over and over, hear the same arguments made by men that were all exactly the same. Rapists, drug dealers, abusers. Different crimes, but they all begged at his feet like the low lives they were. The Red Hood was a master of making people feel pain. But Jason? Jason was tired of inflicting the same injuries night in, night out.

_I just need a little favour Todders. An itty, bitty favour, so come on, give daddy a little clue. Who’s the bat?_

The sniveling man’s bloodshot eyes snapped to the red helmet with pure horror as Jason loaded his gun slowly, purposefully. Under the hood, he wanted to scoff at the way the man told him everything: the drugs, who supplied them, where they were stored. Anything, everything as he groveled at the Red Hood’s feet, gravel stuck in the palm of his hands and snot bubbling from his nose.

The Red Hood wouldn’t spare him, though, and neither would the man behind the mask. This particular drug dealer had committed too many atrocities, taken too many innocent lives as if they were simply chess pawns and not people with feelings and beating hearts. He didn’t deserve to live, no matter what the Bruce - Batman - thought. Jason would never, ever, let another child die.

Without warning, the Red Hood shot the man in the head.

Then, it was silence in Gotham, not true silence, but the quietest it ever got. The odd occasional gunshot, scream of sirens heading god knows where. The Red Hood, a strange amalgamation of boy and man - for that was what Jason was, hanging on the precipice, being nineteen physically but mentally much, much older - looked up at the stars. He spared no glance at the brains splattered across the wall almost like pink blancmange, instead dipping the tip of his glove in the viscous red. Crudely, he smeared his vigilante name on the concrete above the man’s head.

A sign. A warning. Because he wouldn’t give them a second chance, never would. It was his unspoken rule. 

Jason walked past the people he had put down, bodies skewed and red bleeding into the puddles, disappearing into the night without a trace, as quiet as he had come.

It was never the same, the fight, now. There was no thrill, no kicking ass and enjoying it. Jason was tired of fighting, tired of the way that he could put down grow men and not care; Robin had been pizzazz and brightness and life, that wasn’t Jason anymore.

_Daddy’s getting tired of waiting, Rob. Do I have to give you a little reminder?_

Even after going in the pit and coming out with peak physical conditions, parts of Jason always had a dull ache. It was as if the injuries were still there, the wounds that the Joker inflicted were branded deep within him.

On cold nights when snow piled up on windowsills, his scars would hurt the most; it would throb, the skin stretched taught as he rocked himself awake, fingers counting his pulse as if were the last lifeline he had. He flexed his fingers, looking over the skyline, wiping the coppery blood on his cargo pants. The knots of tissue meant that he could barely bend his digits, the joints almost seized up.

Mirrors would crack when he looked at them, lights would flicker and shatter. His heartbeat was slow - far to slow - and his body ran at fever temperatures normally. The Lazarus Pit had changed him, broken every piece of him into fragments and then sewn him back together to just crack him apart again. Nothing was the same, now, although that was most likely the price of being resurrected.

Jason still remembered the first time he had fought as Robin. Bruce - much younger with less old silver in his dark hair - had given Jason strict instructions to wait for his signal before engaging.

It had been exciting and he had felt fear, true fear that clutched at your heart and squeezed. Young, teenage him had been able to live, laugh, not be stuck in a hollow shell in an empty apartment without any furniture.

The alley had been shrouded with thick shadow, Penguin’s goons loitering around and scuffing their shoes on the gravel, bored. The only light was a broken neon sign casting the street in an eery red glow; the puddles in the pitted ground rippled crimson. Soon to have blood in, he had thought, Robin was going to bring justice beside Batman with style.

_Milk, cookies. Green, purple. What else goes together? That’s right, Toddie, Robin and Crowbar. Shall we see if its right?_

They had squatted, looming over the alley covered by darkness, the perfect duo. Even thinking about it now made Jason want to punch something. It had been tangible in the air, something big was going to occur and pierce the flimsy membrane of the tentative quiet. Batman’s warm grip had brought him out of his doubt, after all, there had been ten men and only two of them.

In every single mathematics equation it should have been impossible. But it never was, not with Batman and Robin.

And then, Bruce dropped like a stone, unfurling like his name sake as he hit the ground. Smoke was everywhere, thick as the ancient drapes in the Manor. Even high above the chaos as close to the stars as he had ever been, the mist was bitter, acrid, and catching in his throat and cloying his lungs. And yet, he’d never felt more alive.

When Jason had pulled the cape away from his face, he was almost surprised. Below him in the narrow street, surrounded by the last haze of smoke was four men, unconscious with as few lacerations as possible. Jason had let out a low whistle, lost on the men below as it evaporated high into the night sky.

Batman was an incredible fighter to watch - he would give the old man, the traitor, that - he moved like fire on petrol, effortless coordination. Jason remembered bitterly the way that he had thought that if he ever became even as half as effective as his mentor and father figure, he’d be exceptionally happy. God, he’d surpassed Bruce now and he didn’t even have a taste of the happiness he should have felt.

Instead, there was nothing. Always empty.

The stars had been the only one privy to his fist pump to the air as Bruce roundhouse kicked a thug in the chest, his heartbeat quickening under the Robin suit at the thrill of the fight that Jason was keen to enter.

Robin was supposed to wait for a signal, but Jason didn’t follow rules.

His landing was shit, he remembered vividly - far too unbalanced and it made his teeth chatter on impact - but he’d punched and kicked and jumped, landing a particularly nasty blow to one goon’s face that had gotten him a cold reprimanding afterwards, but he hadn’t cared. Kicking ass, he had realized startlingly, was what Jason was good at. He’d never been good at anything, but there was something, something under his skin and deep in his bones that told him that this was what he was supposed to do.

Robin, beside Batman, had taken out quite a few men. Jason had landed a good chop to one’s throat: debilitating but not life threatening. Teenage, angst riddled him had hated those lousy rules even more than adult Jason, which was why he hardly stuck to them when Bruce wasn’t around; they were useless anyway he had believed.

Jason had laughed at one point, high on endorphins, shouting the odd cathartic ‘fuck you’ as he put down person after person. The shuriken on his chest had positively gleamed under the thick blood and red glow of the sign. Looking back, it was almost a sign.

Almost, because Jason didn’t believe in that trash, not after everything he’d been though.

They were done as Commissioner Gordon’s beat up car pulled up. Surrounded by bodies like roses on a theatre stage that the adoring audience had thrown, Bruce had nodded at the greying man and then they had disappeared. Batman had his info, Gordon had his case and Jason...he had had his chance to drain every ounce of anger that he had that day.

Fighting was never as fun as it was back as Robin and it never would be, Jason was sure. The Pit had taken from him many things, as had death, yet only one of them he really missed. It wasn’t a small part either: it was the inhibited fun that was inherently him, that was Jason’s Robin. It was childhood and candy floss and fairground rides at three am for the fun of it, winking at pretty girls and boys alike, sitting icing cakes with Alfred and carrying old ladies shopping across the street for a kiss on the cheek.

He’d never be that boy, the man that that boy would have grown into.

_Now, now Todders, Daddy’s here. You’re mine, mine to do with as I like, so tell me. Who’s the bat?_

There was nothing left of the original Jason Todd in him. The Red Hood was fucked up, was what tabloid after tabloid wrote in thick print over the photos of decomposing bodies and equally nasty things that didn’t even effect him anymore.

They were right, because all Jason felt was anger. It burned through every word, every punch, everything he touched decayed and died under the sheer force of his frustration. Nothing appealed to him anymore; not the fight nor fancy food. He had once longed for the comfort of a warm body tangled in sheets, but even that stirred no response from him.

Jason was broken, so incredible wrong, that it almost hurt. All that was left was a ghost of a person that had once had life and soul; a shell that barely breathed or spoke, let alone experience anything other than the odd stab of betrayal or that a particular line on a book was fairly well written.

Gotham City was truly alive at night, and somehow, the Pit had gifted him with a curse of extra sensitive hearing. Every little sound he heard, every cry for help, and part of him prevailed and came to the rescue. His heart must still have been beating somehow, because he couldn’t possibly leave the haunting scream of a young boy that sounded not even a year past eight to fend for himself.

He leaned against the fan in the corner, tangled with ragwort and brambles from somewhere, though he knew not where in a city that had less green spaces than a scrap yard and smog that covered everything that sat in one place too long.

The cigarette between his lips was barely a comforter anymore for there was nothing to comfort, only anger which he could never seem to truly get rid of. The Red Hood fed off of his one emotion like a parasite, but Jason was tired of the way it controlled him and the way he sparked easier than the best of matches.

Watching the lights flicker, he couldn’t help but smirk, though it held none of the charm or emotion of the one that he used to wear. Gotham spread across the landscape like a stain that you couldn’t quite get rid of, oozing tar freckled with bright lights, tall buildings smattered between tenement blocks that crumbled and crusted.

It was beautiful in its own evil way. Jason wondered if he could only see it because it was like him: broken, but something that could never seem to be killed.

_Nightie night, Toddie. Robin’s wings can’t save you now, my boy. Tick, tock. Tick, tock._

Resurrection happened for a reason, whether or not it was the one he thought. It was his duty to make sure that little girl’s didn’t die, teenage boy’s didn’t sit mute and accept the sexual abuse they received. Only he could do it, for he had seen first hand the failures of the Bat. Jason was tired - my God, was he tired - but he wouldn’t stop because if he did, someone would die who could give the world so much.

Somedays, he wished that he was never resurrected. Sleep would have been easier, that was for sure. Stubbing his cigarette out with a hiss on the concrete, the Red Hood turned away, shoulders hunched with tension.

The work never stopped for him until his torso was painted black and blue. And it wasn’t, not yet.


End file.
